The Banality of Evil Politics

Guest Opinion

By Isiah Smith, Jr. | March 7, 2026

We often settle for lukewarm coffee, mediocre films, and, occasionally, leaders who underwhelm us. But why do we tolerate mediocrity in our most important decisions? These ill-considered choices contribute to a broader theme about how and why average choices shape our lives more than we realize. When we choose mediocre leaders, we often end up with someone like Pam Bondi as our chief law enforcement officer.

Pam Bondi, the 87th U.S. Attorney General, is all the evidence we need to establish that we are not living in a meritocracy.

It’s hard to imagine what the president saw in Bondi other than a passionate defender of the indefensible, a woman who sold her soul to the lowest bidder. In her recent “testimony” before Congress, she adopted a defiant tone, yet she came across as a dark, unhinged personality in over her head.

Bondi’s defense of the indefensible perhaps reached its apotheosis in her disturbing testimony before Congress. “Have any of you apologized to President Trump?” she shrieked at one point. “Have any of you apologized to President Trump for trying to impeach him?”

She continued to shriek, but her words were drowned out by the laughter echoing through the Senate chambers. The members seemed unsure whether she was apologizing for failing to impeach and convict her boss.

Perhaps the most indelible image, one that should, and I believe will, haunt Bondi to her grave, was her refusal to turn and face Epstein’s victims or acknowledge their suffering. She was a high-ranking female government official who’d rather defend pedophiles than acknowledge the pain of countless young women who had suffered at their hands. Given the administration’s outsized efforts to shield the Epstein files from public scrutiny, those files almost certainly contain awful details about the conduct of Bondi’s patron and indefensible boss.

“Where do they find these people?” my grandson, Erik, who is studying International Relations at Lund University in Sweden, asked me after watching Bondi’s “testimony” and that of other administration figures. “Some of them seem like just bad people. How were they selected to serve in politics? Hardly any of them seem smart or particularly intelligent. They certainly don’t appear to be good people at all.”

I remind Erik of Hannah Arendt’s observations about the architects of Hitler’s genocide, which led her to coin the phrase “the banality of evil.” Erik’s class has been studying Arendt’s writings, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt noted that the horrors of Nazism were not committed by brilliant geniuses but by the normalization of thoughtless, amoral behavior that ultimately became evil. Thus, while Bondi and other representatives of the Trump administration appear, on the surface, to be dim-witted backroom grifters, they are warnings of something far more sinister and malign lurking beneath.

The question that Arendt grappled with—and that we must—was whether one can commit evil acts without being evil. In 1961, she reported for The New Yorker on the war crimes of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for the logistics of transporting millions of Jews to concentration camps to carry out the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt wrote: “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon that stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago, nor Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”

She goes on to say “That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together, which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

Arendt was surprised to find that Eichmann was merely an ordinary, rather bland bureaucrat, who was “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” His primary motive was to advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster. Instead, he committed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact tied to his “thoughtlessness,” a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts.

We shall leave it to history to decide whether Pam Bondi and others were, in fact, evil or primarily motivated by ambition. Both judgments seem equally likely.

Isiah Smith, Jr. is a retired government attorney.